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Of moving images and throbbing hearts

The seventh season of Cracking the Frame opens this evening at cinema Rialto in Amsterdam and this year we open with an exclusive European Premiere, presented in collaboration with the Stedelijk Museum and introduced by their curator Karen Archey.

EVERYBODY KNOWS… ELIZABETH MURRAY
Kristi Zea | USA | 2016 | 60 min

EVERYBODY KNOWS… ELIZABETH MURRAY is an intimate portrait of the groundbreaking feminist artist Elizabeth Murray.
The film explores the relationship between Murray’s family life and career, and reconsiders her place in contemporary art history. As her paintings defied efforts at categorization, Murray herself broke convention, leaving an indelible imprint on contemporary art and becoming the fifth woman to be celebrated with a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, in 2005.

EKEM chronicles Murray’s remarkable journey with a mix of interviews with artists, curators and friends, private home videos and excerpts from her journals, voiced by Meryl Streep, tracing Murray’s life, from years as a struggling single mother to having a growing family and thriving career. From her early 1960’s “funk-inflected pop” and her painterly minimalism in the 70’s, to her dynamic fractured canvases of the 1990s and 2000s, Murray worked without hesitation through – and often in spite of – market trends, historical movements and her failing health, until she lost her life to cancer in 2007.

“The movie shows the great variety of Murray’s always vivid, colorful work, and culminates with a triumph not just for Murray but also, as the film takes pains to point out, for women in American art” – The New York Times

This special screening will be introduced by Stedelijk Museum’s curator Karen Archey.
Karen Archey is Curator of Contemporary Art, Time-based Media at Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam. Prior to joining Stedelijk, she worked as an art critic, independent curator and editor of e-flux conversations in Berlin and New York.

As always, follow-up screenings will take place in selected Dutch and Belgian cinemas next month.

Cracking the Frame

Established in 2011, Cracking the Frame is a monthly program featuring an international selection of theatrically unreleased, critically acclaimed documentary portraits of established contemporary artists, photographers, filmmakers and global thinkers.

Another great review for Yamato (California), this time on the New York Times!

“The jangling energy of the young filmmaker Daisuke Miyazaki’s second feature, Yamato (California), is a far cry from the gentle rhythms of In This Corner of the World. But Mr. Miyazaki’s angry young heroine, an aspiring rapper named Sakura, is a contemporary analogue of Mr. Katabuchi’s Suzu. The two films play like a natural pairing, bookends of the Japan-United States wartime experience.”

“My name is John Francis Pastorius III. I’m the greatest bass player in the world.”

JACO
Stephen Kijak, Paul Marchand
USA | 2015 | 110 min
Dutch Premiere

JACO tells the story of Jaco Pastorius, a self-taught, larger-than-life musician who single-handedly changed the course of modern music by redefining the sound and the role of the electric bass guitar.

There are few musicians who fundamentally change their instrument, and even fewer still who transcend their instrument altogether. Jaco Pastorius did both.
In 1976, Jaco’s melodic “singing” bass style redefined the role of the bass in modern music. Almost overnight, fellow musicians and critics hailed Jaco Pastorius as “the future of modern music.”
JACO features never-before-seen 8mm film, photographs, and audio recordings, next to the first-hand memories and insights from an array of artists such as Joni Mitchell, Sting, Flea, Herbie Hancock, Geddy Lee, Bootsy Collins, Santana and Wayne Shorter and it’s directed by a duo of award-winning documentary filmmakers, Stephen Kijak (Scott Walker: 30 Century Man, We Are X, Stones in Exile) and Paul Marchand (The 50 Year Argument), and produced by Metallica’s Robert Trujillo with Passion Pictures, the production company behind Searching for Sugar Man.

Duthc premiere on Wednesday 07 June 19:30h at Rialto Amsterdam with an introduction by music journalist and programmer Gijsbert Kamer (Volkskrant, VPRO, Lowlands). Follow-up screenings will take place in selected Dutch cinemas from September. Stay tuned.

Cracking the Frame

A monthly program featuring an international selection of theatrically unreleased, critically acclaimed arts documentaries.
Cracking the Frame focuses on the creative intersection between art and film through thought-provoking cinematic portraits of the life and work of established contemporary artists, photographers, filmmakers and global thinkers.

I am thrilled and proud to finally be able to announce that the program of Cracking the Frame will be presented by Sphinx Cinema in Gent from June 2017 onward.
After six successful years, the only regular program dedicated to art documentaries in The Netherlands not only continues to grow but has finally reached across the border.
Thank you to the programmers of Sphinx Cinema for welcoming and endorsing Cracking the Frame in the beautiful city of Gent!

For this brand new CineSonic show the trailblazing Dutch techno producer Albert van Abbe will present his musical interpretation of three videos by international contemporary artists Broersen & Lukács, Sebastian Diaz Morales and Seoungho Cho.

One of the very few Dutch techno live acts having performed at Berghain, Awakenings and ADE, Eindhoven’s Albert van Abbe has been involved in many different musical projects over the past 15 years.

Van Abbe will be accompanied by a spoken word-performance by Daan Mol, avant-garde poet and ex-frontman of indie Dutch band Contra Contra.

This original CineSonic show will take place on Wednesday 24 May, 19:30 at Studio K Amsterdam and it is presented in collaboration with LIMA Media Art Platform.

“I think every time you do something, like a painting or whatever, you go with ideas and sometimes the past can conjure those ideas and color them, even if they’re new ideas, the past colors them.” – David Lynch

Through personal photos, home movies and his own paintings, the iconic cineaste David Lynch reveals his formative years, from his idyllic upbringing in small town America and his early fascination with the ‘art life’, to the dark streets of Philadelphia, where he first imagined “paintings that moved, with sound” and made his first short films combining animation and live action.

Painting in his studio or playing with his youngest daughter (to whom the film is dedicated), Lynch candidly retells personal stories from his past that unfold like scenes from his films and that shine a light into the dark corners of Lynch’s unique world.

Directed by a trio of Lynch’s collaborators (Jon Nguyen, Rick Barnes, Olivia Neergaard-Holm), this intimate documentary portrait exposes the personal experiences that shaped one of cinema’s most enigmatic auteurs and reveals how art allowed him to find his place in the world and, at the same time, to create a world of his own.

“This cockeyed, oblique attempt to get closer to the worldview of David Lynch — one of American cinema’s finest oddities — is a compelling slice of cinephile inquiry.” – RogerEbert.com

Amsterdam premiere on Wednesday 24 May 19:30h at Rialto Amsterdam with an introduction by a special guest. Follow-up screenings will take place in selected Dutch cinemas in June.

Cracking the Frame

A monthly program featuring an international selection of theatrically unreleased, critically acclaimed arts documentaries.
Cracking the Frame focuses on the creative intersection between art and film through thought-provoking cinematic portraits of the life and work of established contemporary artists, photographers, filmmakers and global thinkers.

In case you were wondering, here’s the complete Cracking the Frame Presents @ Van Gogh Museum program. The program will be screened twice, at 19:00 and 20:00, as part of the Museum’s evening program Vincent on Friday on the 28th of April.

Idem Paris
David Lynch – 7:48 min
Short documentary directed by David Lynch. The film is a wordless observation of the lithographic process at the legendary fine art printing studio Idem Paris.

Choreography for Copy Machine (Photocopy Cha Cha)
Chel White – 3:40 min
The ultimate Xerox fetish film! All of this film’s images were created solely by using the photographic capabilities of a photocopying machine.

Division
Johan Rijpma – 1:34 min
A piece of paper is ripped multiple times, creating a series of new patterns. Directed by Dutch visual artist and filmmaker Johan Rijpma.

I can finally announce that next Cracking the Frame Presents curated event will take place on 28 April at Van Gogh Museum!

The Museum invited Cracking the Frame to compile a short film program to be presented as part of their new thematic exhibition ‘Prints in Paris’. The program is a mix of experimental films, artist’s videos, documentaries and animations that pay tribute to the aesthetics of classic art prints or that are created utilising some of the techniques directly associated to printmaking (etching, collage, xerographic printing…). The selection includes recent and classic productions by international filmmakers and video artists such as DavidLynch, Lotte Reiniger, Larry Jordan, MarthaColburn, Orosz Istvan, Chel White, Johan Rijpma and Gregoire Dupond.

The program will be screened twice in the evening of Friday 28 April, as part of the Museum monthly program ‘Vincent on Friday’ and it is kindly supported by Goethe Institute Amsterdam.

This presentation marks Cracking the Frame first collaboration with the prestigious Van Gogh Museum and I am thrilled to finally be able to present this program!

Legendary performance artists Marina Abramović travels through Brazil at the peak of a deep personal crisis, in search of personal healing and artistic inspiration. The route is comprised of confronting encounters with healers, sages and shamans, and intimate personal rituals and experiences in the Brazilian natural landscape. Through this plunge into the mysterious and the unknown Abramović experiences sacred rituals and attempts to explore the boundaries and limits between artistic process and spirituality.

In what plays out as a sort of spiritual thriller, the documentary follows Abramović through a profound introspective journey through painful memories and past experiences, while revealing the intimate creative process of one of the most important artists of our time.

THE SPACE IN BETWEEN is co-directed by Brazilian artist and filmmaker Marco Del Fiol. During the course of the past decade Del Fiol focused on capturing the work of some of the most important contemporary artists of our time, such as Olafur Eliasson, Isaac Julien and Rafael Franca.

The Dutch premiere will take place on Wednesday 26 April 19:30h at Rialto Amsterdam with an introduction by a special guest. Further screenings will take place in selected Dutch cinemas in May.

Cracking the Frame

A monthly program featuring an international selection of theatrically unreleased, critically acclaimed arts documentaries.
Cracking the Frame focuses on the creative intersection between art and film through thought-provoking cinematic portraits of the life and work of established contemporary artists, photographers, filmmakers and global thinkers.